Three

Today will probably be another short post since it’s getting late in
the satellite pass. I’ve been outside three times already today —
first for a morning jog out to the IceCube laboratory (ICL), then to
take the obligatory “hero shots” out at the Pole markers (there is a
geographic pole marker, which moves every year as the ice, with the
Station and everything else, gradually glides towards some distant
oblivion in the Southern Ocean; and the Ceremonial Pole a few dozen
meters away which is ringed with the flags of signatories of the
Antarctic Treaty). Finally, I went out to meet Mark D., a new
collaborator from Belgium who I hadn’t met before. On his plane were
half a dozen “DVs” — Distinguished Visitors, which in this case
included reporters from the National Science Foundation and National
Geographic, which may stroll by here any moment.

Figure 2: IceCube Laboratory

It was interesting going out to the ICL and seeing all of the strings
cabled to computers there. It looks quite well organized and
impressive to me, very 21st Century, and I thought of how far we’ve
come since the AMANDA days in the 1990s when we ran everything off of
a Macintosh desktop computer. We have perhaps several thousand times
as much computing power on the Ice now, and though there are plenty of
loose ends and improvements to be made, I think the overall design is
correspondingly more advanced, robust and complete.

Yesterday we collected some test data to pave the way for the first
runs of the full 86-string detector, which required some trial and
error but which were ultimately successful. Progress is being made,
though schedules might be a bit tight if we are going to get the first
full runs in before I leave in little over a week (!).